Ghosts of Columbia

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  On a cold hard fall day, more like winter, those houses seemed as out of place as a painted old courtesan at dawn.

  I kept walking until I found Thorton Place, and vanBecton’s house. It was about as I had imagined it—an elegant, impeccably manicured, false Georgian town house with real marble pillars and slate walks and steps.

  I didn’t appear to look at his house, instead sketching his neighbor’s side garden on a plain piece of paper while I continued studying the false Georgian. There were sensors mounted inconspicuously in various places. I really wasn’t interested in the sensors but in the positions of the wireset and power lines. The large maple with the overhanging limbs offered some intriguing possibilities.

  After I finished the sketch and some brief notes, I made my way back down Newfoundland, the other cross artery leading back to Dupont Circle, and a memorial of sorts. The debate over that state’s admission had nearly led to war with both England and France, and only the advance of the Austrians on Rome had held off what could have been a catastrophe. Quebec still made threatening sounds about Newfoundland, sounds guaranteed mostly to extract trade concessions from Columbia.

  Many of the houses on Newfoundland Avenue date from the fifties, with glass bricks and angular constructions that seem to lean toward the sidewalks. Nothing is so dated as past modernism. The demolition crew working on an old “modern” mansion confirmed that, as did my sneezes at the dust. Two empty steam haulers waited to be loaded with debris, and I had to cross the street to the eastern side to get back down to Dupont Circle.

  When I finished sneezing, I stopped by Von Kappel and Sons, Stationers, where I browsed through the rag and parchment specialty items, finally selecting a heavy off-cream paper with a marbled bluish-green border. I also bought two dozen large envelopes, the ten-by-thirteen-inch kind with accordion pleats that can hold nearly a hundred pages of documents. The bill for the fifty sheets of classy marbled paper, two dozen matching envelopes, and the bigger document envelopes totaled $49.37.

  The clerk didn’t quite sniff at my half-open trench coat and cheap wool suit, but he said as little as possible. “Your change, sir.”

  “Thank you.” I put the bag under my arm and made my way across the circle.

  Babbage-Copy was at the corner of Nineteenth and N, and they had machines and printers you could rent by the hour.

  The balding young clerk put his thumb in his economics textbook and flipped a switch on his console. “Ten dollars. That’s for two hours. Copies are five cents a page on the impact printer.” He handed me a metal disk. “Put that in the control panel and bring it back here when you’re done. Take machine number six.”

  He was back taking notes on a yellow lined pad even before I sat down. Why, with all the Babbage machines around, didn’t he use one for his notes? There was no telling. Some authors still write longhand, although I can’t see why. Maybe they’re masochists.

  Still, I had to set up the week, and that meant starting with a simple one-page introduction—something to tease the reporters. I had some ideas, but it took me several drafts before I had a usable piece.

  WHAT IS THE REAL PSYCHIC RESEARCH STORY?

  A worldwide wave of fires and bombings has struck Babbage research centers dealing with psychic research. Every major political and religious figure has publicly deplored this violence, yet violence on such a scale is highly unlikely without the resources of some form of organization. Consider these issues:

  What organization(s) or government(s) have an interest in preventing psychic research? Why?

  Why are militarily related projects the majority of targets?

  What has been the goal of such research?

  Why has no information on the specific research projects and their results ever been made public?

  What role has the Defense Ministry played?

  What have the president’s budget examiners discovered, and why has that information not been released?

  Further specific information will be forthcoming in response to the crisis.

  The Spirit Preservation League

  That no Spirit Preservation League existed was immaterial. It would, and certainly none of the organized religions were likely to gainsay its purpose.

  Then I drafted the Spirit Preservation League announcements that would precede and follow—I hoped—the coming week’s actions, assuming that vanBecton and Ralston didn’t find me before I found them.

  After I got all those completed, I had to hand-feed the marbled stationery to the printer. It jammed a couple of times, but I managed to get the paper feed straightened out, although it ruined several sheets of the impossibly expensive paper. I kept those—no sense in leaving unnecessary traces anywhere. Then I played with the machine to see if I could get a script facsimile, and it wasn’t too bad. So I printed the necessary names on the envelopes.

  Coming after the cheap and shoddy diatribe of the Order of Jeremiah, I trusted the contrast in tone and the clearly high-quality, expensive stationery would begin to plant the idea that more than a few individuals, crazy and not so crazy, were concerned about the political games being played around the question of psychic research.

  After finishing the high-quality printing, I used the copier to make up ten sets of documents in two separate sets. I could only see a need for six, but if I had an opportunity to distribute extras, I wanted those extras handy. All the documents went in the case. No one looks at papers, and they wouldn’t look at mine either, unless they knew who I was. In that case, I was probably dead anyway.

  During the whole procedure, the clerk never looked my way. He did check the meters, though, when I returned to the turnstile to leave.

  “Those extra runs on the printer are a nickel each.”

  All in all, another fifteen dollars gone, but money well spent, I trusted. With that cheerful thought in mind, and with very tired feet, I took a cab down to the Smithsonian, but I bypassed the Dutch Masters and went instead to the Museum of Industry and Technology. Even when you’ve seen it all, there’s something incredible about it—Holland’s first submersible, the first Curtiss aeroplane, the first flash boiler that made the steamer competitive with the Ford petrol car, the Stanley racer that smashed the two-hundred-mile-per-hour mark, the first steam turbine car pioneered by Hughes.

  After I marveled at the wonders of technology, I did cross the Mall, looking past the B&P station to the Capitol, white against the gray clouds, to an art gallery, the Harte, which contained mostly modern works. They had a new exhibit, strange sketches by someone named Warhol. I wasn’t that impressed.

  So I took a trolley back up to the Albert Pick House and collapsed onto the bed for a nap. I didn’t wake up until after sunset, when the comparative silence disturbed me. I took another shower and put on a clean shirt and underclothes but the same hard wool suit, and headed to the elevator, where I joined a couple on the lurching descent to the lobby. They both smelled of cheap cigarettes, and I left them behind almost as rudely as my attire would have dictated, quickly checking the full-length mirror before moving past the desk and toward the street. I looked like Peter Hloddn, all right, worn around the edges, not quite haunted.

  Trader Vic’s was less than a block away, but it was too expensive and too highclass for Hloddn, the traveling ledger-man. Instead, I walked two blocks to a place whose name was lost in the neon swirls meant to spell it out. Inside, the dark wood and dim lights confirmed my initial impression of a tavern, not quite cheap enough for a bar, nor good enough to be a restaurant. I slipped into a side booth for two.

  About half the men in the tavern wore working flannel; the rest wore cheap suits or barely matched coats and trousers. The women wore trousers and short jackets, and their square-cut hair made their faces harder than the men’s.

  At the far end of the narrow room, two singers, one at the piano and the other a woman with a guitar, crooned out a semblance of a melody.

  “Drink?” asked the waitress.

  “Food?”

 
; She slipped an oblong of cardboard in front of me. From it, I learned that I was in “The Dive.” It didn’t take long to decide on what to eat.

  “How are the chops?”

  “Steak pie’s better.”

  “I’ll take it and a light draft.” I almost asked for Grolsch, but that would have been out of character. The almost-slip bothered me. It wouldn’t have happened ten years earlier.

  “Morris all right?”

  “Fine.”

  The beer came immediately, and I took a sip, but not much more. I hadn’t eaten anything since the morning, one reason I’d probably collapsed. For once I hadn’t even felt that hungry. But not eating was stupid in the current situation, and I intended to eat just about everything that came with the steak pie.

  Like all of the men in flannel, and some of those in working suits, I sang the chorus with the singers, careful to slur the edges of the words and swing the heavy glass stein, trying to ignore the incongruity of steins and Old West country songs composed in the last decade or so.

  “Favorite rails and dim-lit places,

  nine of crowns and spade of aces,

  let me drink away the pain,

  let me ride that evening train.

  “And let those boxcars roll!

  Make my point and save my soul …”

  The pianist was good, but he certainly wasn’t any Edo deWaart, either.

  “Here you go.” The waitress set the steak pie, wide fried potato strips, and boiled brussel sprouts in front of me.

  “Thank you.” I began to eat, not caring especially that the singing duo had taken a break. The steak pie was good, the potatoes fair, and the brussels sprouts a decent imitation of sawdust dipped in turpentine. I ate it all and finished the amber beer in the process.

  No sooner had I set down the stein than the waitress was there. “You want another Morris?”

  “Please.”

  She was back in instants with another stein. “The whole thing comes to ten.”

  I handed her ten and a silver dollar.

  “Thanks, Sarge.”

  I nodded and looked at the amber liquid, ignoring the “Sarge.” The second Morris had to last for a while. So I sipped it slowly, the only way I could now that my stomach was nearly full.

  One of the less square-faced women, probably younger than me but looking older despite the dyed black hair, glanced from an adjoining table.

  I smiled sadly and shrugged, implying that I was lonely but not exactly flush. The green-rimmed eyes studied my cheap dark suit, and she slipped away from the other woman and eased into the other side of the booth. She carried her own stein, half-full.

  “Lonely, mister?”

  “Peter. Peter Hloddn at your service. Best damned ledgerman on the East Coast—no … You can see that’s not true.” I set down the glass stein just hard enough to shake the dark-varnished oak top a bit. “I sell enough to make ends meet, not enough to support a wife, and that’s good because I don’t have one, and I couldn’t support her when I did.”

  “Thel. Thel Froehle. You come here often?” She set the half-full stein on the damp wood. All the wood was damp, despite the antique hot-air furnace that rumbled from somewhere beneath the bar.

  “No. I can’t pay for many overpriced beers. The company doesn’t pay for much beyond the room, and I can’t always sit and look at the videolink.”

  “You could go down to the Mall and look at the pictures.”

  “I could. Sometimes I do, like today, when I’m here on Saturdays.” I took a sip of warm beer from the stein, and it tasted more like lacquer the warmer it got. I guess I’m not really Dutch, despite the genes, because I’m not fond of warm beer or beer you have to chew. “How many times can you look at pictures?”

  “I like pictures.” She shook the thick dark hair that was probably blond beneath the color. Blonds had been out of fashion for almost a decade with the reappearance of the “ghost” look—pale skin set off by dark hair.

  “So do I, but I like people better. Pictures don’t talk.”

  “Sometimes it’s better when people don’t talk.”

  She had me there, and I tried not to shrug, instead taking a gulp from the stein.

  “You drink that fast, and that stuff will kill you.”

  “Something will. Not going to get out of life alive anyway.”

  “No.” Thel took a small swallow from her stein and licked a touch of foam off her lips with the tip of her tongue. “No reason to bury your face in the suds. You ought to look at what’s happening on the trip.”

  “The old life’s-a-journey business. My wife always said we should go first class. She tried, and I went broke, and she left.”

  “You’re cheerful.”

  “Sorry.” Except I wasn’t, exactly. My problem was that I saw what was happening, and I didn’t like it, no matter how it turned out.

  “Cheer up. Things could be worse.” She took another swallow from her stein.

  I forced a smile in return. I didn’t feel like it, since it seemed like every time I started to cheer up, things had gotten worse. “They could be. They have been. Suppose I should be grateful.” I sipped the Morris. “You grow up around here?”

  “No. New Ostend. Came here with the B and P when they closed the New

  Amsterdam office.”

  “Still work for them?”

  “Hardly. I work for a legal office down on Fifteenth. It pays the rent.”

  “Why’d you leave the railroad?”

  She gave me a sad smile. “Ghosts. You know how many people died in that accident last year? Half of them seem to haunt the offices.”

  I had to frown. Ghosts usually stayed near where they died.

  “See, when the train crashed through the platform, it was a mess, so they carted some of them upstairs into the offices. Maybe three or four died right there.” She shivered. “Don’t seem right. Poor souls can’t even stay near friends or family.”

  “Maybe it’d be better if they’d died sudden.”

  “I don’t know.” This time her swallow was a healthy one.

  “Read something about the government trying to stop ghosts. Think that would have helped? Would you have stayed there if the office wasn’t haunted?”

  “Frig the government. Always messing with people. Ought to leave the damned souls alone. Leave us all alone.”

  “Yeah.” I sighed.

  “They don’t make it easy, do they?” she asked.

  I shook my head. They certainly didn’t.

  She gave me a smile, and stood, her empty stein in her hand. “See you around, . Sarge.”

  Did I really look like an undercover watch officer? Or was that just familiarity? Did it matter, or would it throw off vanBecton’s boys?

  Since I didn’t know, I staggered back to my small, cold room. I would have liked to call Llysette, but that would have been one of the dumbest things I could have done, and I wasn’t that stupid or desperate—not yet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Waking up with a headache in a crummy small hotel room to the sound of air hammers on the street below is not recommended for health, sanity, or a cheerful outlook on life. Then again, why should my outlook have been particularly cheerful?

  Ralston McGuiness and Gillaume vanBecton both wanted me out of the way. Hans Waetjen either had orders to frame me for a pair of murders or was being set up so that it was in his interest to do so. My lover had turned cold toward me, or I thought she had, and the family ghost was quoting Shakespeare and old songs at me, or I thought she was. I really couldn’t drink, but I’d eaten and drunk too much the night before, or I thought I had. And now I needed to roam through Georgetown to set up a rather improbable scenario that I would have instantly rejected if I’d been my own supervisor back in my Spazi days.

  Outside, the sky was cheerfully blue, and the light hammered at my closed eyelids when the air hammers didn’t. Construction on Sunday? Why not? After all, this was Columbia, land of free enterprise, and a dolla
r to whoever provided the best service, Lord’s day or not.

  Finally I staggered into the bathroom in an attempt to deal with attacks on all internal systems. After that, I tried not to groan while I stood under the hot shower. That was hard because the water temperature jumped from lukewarm to scalding and back again, sort of like my life in recent weeks.

  I wore flannel and worn khakis when I left the room. No ledgerman would waste his good suit on an off Sunday.

  The Bread and Chocolate across the street was closed, but I found a hole-inthe-wall a block up and around the corner, Brother George’s. Brother George’s poached eggs were just right, and the toast wasn’t burned. I still almost choked because the cigarette smoke was so thick, and I burned my tongue with the chocolate because I was trying not to cough from the smoke.

  After breakfast, all of two dollars, which you couldn’t beat, even for all the smoke that still clung to me, I took the Georgetown trolley out to Thirty-third and M. I should have worn a jacket, but I hadn’t brought anything except the trench coat—a definite oversight on my part, but under stress you don’t always think of everything you need. I hoped I hadn’t left anything really important behind, but I probably had. I just didn’t know what it was.

  In Georgetown, I had to scout out Ralston McGuiness’s place, and then I had to begin my engineering—heavy engineering.

  When I got off the trolley, I shivered for the first two blocks uphill, but walking quickly seemed to help, and by the third I was doing all right, and I had no trouble finding Ralston’s place. His name had been in the wireset book, unlike vanBecton’s, which had taken some creativity to obtain.

  His home was a modest town house off P Street, if a three-story brick town house in rococo dress with a screened half-porch off to the side could be classed as modest. That section hadn’t really been fully gentrified, and Ralston took the trolley to and from the Presidential Palace and walked the four blocks each way virtually every day. He’d mentioned that walk in one of his attempts to prove he was just a normal person.